AMD has hired a pair of new senior engineers that have experience gained from working with Apple and QUALCOMM. Reuters reports that the hires are a sign that AMD is diversifying beyond the computer industry and into the hot mobile sector.

The new engineers are Charles Matar and Wayne Meretsky. Matar brings expertise in low power and embedded chip design to AMD. Matar joins AMD as vice president of system-on-chip development. Meretsky worked at Apple on the A-Series processors used in the company's iPad and iPhone. He was named vice president of software IP development according to the sources and lead software development for AMD processors.

Interestingly, both Matar and Meretsky worked at AMD early in their careers.

AMD spokesman Drew Prairie confirmed that AMD had hired the engineers to help the company expand into new markets. Currently AMD depends primarily on the computer industry, but with the computer industry in decline, smartphones, and tablets on the rise AMD is certainly looking to expand into markets with more growth potential.

AMD currently gets about 80% of its revenue from the PC industry. However, the company has a goal of expanding its reach in markets such as communications, micro servers, digital signs, and thin client computers. The company wants to earn 50% of its revenue from those categories within 3 to 4 years.

AMD announced in October of 2012 that it would be laying off 15% of its global workforce. That round of layoffs was the second significant round of job cuts within a year.

Hmm. To say that Wayne Meretsky has "Apple experience" is true but grossly misleading.Wayne was the driving force behind Copland, the OS/2 of Apple's history, Apple's attempt to come up with a modern OS internally during the dark days before Steve returned. From what I saw and read of Copland (which was inside Apple, so more than most of the world) it was not a disaster, but also nothing special --- no reason to choose it over UNIX, and it was constantly delayed, I assume because writing a new real OS from scratch is simply not that easy. Wayne left about the time Steve returned.

So yes, experience in the old, not especially successful Apple, not in the slim and hungry new Apple.

Given Wayne's history since then, I don't know. He comes across as one of these people whose primary skill is selling himself, not actually doing anything, and so has managed to fall upward from one job to the next.(Compare with the previous article on the management style of Steve Ballmer.)

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